“I’ll need the approval of the director to allocate that kind of manpower to Bishkek.”
“Which is why I will call him. In the meantime, make what preparations you can.”
If all went as planned, Titov’s men would take Sava within the hour, before he left Georgia. An interrogation would follow, to find out whether Sava knew any more than Bowlan had about the upcoming operation. When that happened, Titov wanted to be prepared. If Sava had weaknesses that could be exploited, he wanted to know about them; experience had taught him that without that kind of leverage, Sava would be hard to break.
After the interrogation, of course, they’d have to kill the American; on a purely personal level, Titov would welcome the opportunity to do it himself, but even if he hadn’t borne Sava any personal ill will — and he bore him plenty — abducting and interrogating such a man, and then releasing him so that he could share his unfortunate experience with the CIA, wasn’t practical.
“This American, why does he worry you?”
When it came to dealing with his colleagues in the FSB, Titov was inclined to keep the personal to himself and emphasize the professional — it was enough that Sava was tied to Bowlan, an American spy who’d been snooping around the base here in South Ossetia just days before the launch of the big operation. But Titov didn’t know the extent to which the deputy chief had been briefed on that. So all he said was, “Because it is my job to worry. If the director chooses to say more, that is his prerogative.”
14
Mark suspected he’d picked up a tail.
As he purchased an International Herald Tribune from a newsstand inside the terminal, he noted that, fifty feet away, next to a kiosk that sold tacky plastic drinking horns and snow-globe reproductions of medieval churches, a guy wearing jeans and a blue hoodie was seated on a bench, tapping nonstop on his phone. A backpack lay by his feet. Sunglasses were pushed up on his lacquered black hair.
Not so different from hundreds of other guys Mark might have expected to see on the streets of Tbilisi.
But Mark had noted a few anomalies. For one, the guy was dressed as if he were a club-hopping twentysomething. But his black hair was gray at his temples. And he wore a wedding ring. And the camera on the back of his phone was often pointed right at Mark.
Mark had been planning to go through security and wait by his gate, but he had another hour before his flight boarded, so instead he shouldered his satchel, picked up the plastic shopping bag he was using to carry Larry’s electronic equipment, and took a stroll outside. As he darted across two lanes of traffic and into the parking lot opposite the terminal, he observed that the guy with the backpack had also left the terminal; he was standing a hundred feet away, near the road that paralleled the parking lot, looking like he was trying to hail a cab.
Mark wasn’t shocked. He was often tailed by foreign intelligence services. And if Keal had been CIA, as Mark suspected, well, maybe the Georgians or Russians or whoever just thought — correctly — that Mark was guilty by association. He took heart from the fact that the backpack guy appeared to be operating alone; had he been part of a larger team, someone else almost certainly would have handled the exterior surveillance.
Mark made a show of pulling a pen and pad of paper out of his satchel and pretending to record the license plate numbers of two random cars — let the backpack guy waste time puzzling that out, he thought — then headed back toward the terminal, intending to surreptitiously snap a quick photo of his tail on the way inside. He made it as far as the end of the parking lot, and was preparing to traverse the two-lane road, when he sensed a shadow on his left, and caught a brief whiff of a menthol cigarette.
Out of the corner of his left eye, he saw that he was being overtaken by a blue van, and came to the split-second realization he was being played for a fool. Stopping short, he turned to his right and made eye contact with a broad-shouldered bearded man who was tossing a cigarette to the ground. With one hand Mark threw his newspaper into the man’s face and with the other, jabbed a thumb into his eye.
The van came to a quick stop just as someone inside it yanked the cargo door open. Mark jumped in front of the van, smacking the hood hard as he did so, then cried out in pain, and fell to the ground — attracting concerned looks from travelers gathered near the terminal entrance.
“Idiot!” yelled Mark in Russian as he picked himself up off the ground.
The bearded man was clutching his eye, but advancing.
As Mark backed away from the van, he pointed a finger at the driver. “Watch where the fuck you’re going!”
The cargo door of the van slammed shut. The bearded man glanced at the van as though confused and not sure what to do, but by now Mark was safely surrounded by the people gathered near the terminal entrance.
Stupid, thought Mark as he caught his breath inside the terminal. He’d come within a hairsbreadth of being abducted. The guy with the backpack had probably been bait, sent into the terminal with a lousy disguise, and snapping photos with his smartphone to goad a stupid American into trying to flush out a tail.
He massaged the thumb he’d used to poke the bearded guy in the eye. After what had happened to Larry he should have been paying more attention, watching for that van, or something like it, anticipating that someone might try to grab him. If he’d been anticipating instead of reacting, they never would have gotten close.
But who were they? The Russians? Maybe. Probably. Did it have anything to do with this business about Katerina? Mark had no idea. What he did know was that he was getting too old to count on being able to fight his way out of scrapes. He needed to look harder for paths of least resistance. Use his brain to avoid conflict, so that he didn’t wind up like Larry.
He took a few more deep breaths — he was still a bit shaken, although he didn’t like to admit it — looked around him, and decided that, just then, the path of least resistance led through the passenger-screening security checkpoint. Once he was past that, in the secure zone of the airport, the chance of anyone being able to pull off an abduction was close to zero.
In retrospect, he realized he should have headed straight there in the first place.
After passing through the checkpoint, Mark found a coffee shop near his departure gate and took a seat where he had a wall at his back and a clear view of anyone entering the shop. To his left was a service door exit.
He ordered a double espresso, and downed it right away. When Daria called him back on his iPad, which was connected to the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, he was sipping a vodka on the rocks.
“I copied and cropped the photos from June seventh,” she said, “focusing on any identifying marks I could make out. They were all taken from the same vantage point of the earlier photos, so I didn’t worry about the visible buildings or anything else that’s consistent across all the dates.”
“And?”
“Two Tenth Brigade spetsnaz guys, another guy who I believe was VV.”
Spetsnaz referred to any number of Russian special forces units. Mark assumed plenty were in and around the base at South Ossetia, especially those from the Tenth Brigade, which was known to operate in the region; VV — short for vnutrennye voiska—referred to troops controlled by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Though they were common too, there were special units within the VV that, if present, would have raised red flags.